The last lost world
Subtitle: the meaning of the Pleistocene
By: Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne
Contributors: Pyne, Stephen J., 1949-
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780670023639
Subjects: Stratigraphic Geology; Paleogeography
Description: An investigation of the Pleistocene's dual character, as a geologic time, and as a cultural idea. The Pleistocene is the epoch of geologic time closest to our own, a time of ice ages, global migrations, and mass extinctions--of woolly rhinos, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and not least, early species of Homo. It's the world that created ours. But outside that environmental story there exists a parallel narrative that describes how our ideas about the Pleistocene have emerged. This story explains the place of the Pleistocene in shaping intellectual culture, and the role of a rapidly evolving culture in creating the idea of the Pleistocene and in establishing its dimensions. This second story addresses how the epoch, its Earth-shaping events, and its creatures, both those that survived and those that disappeared, helped kindle new sciences and a new origins story as the sciences split from the humanities as a way of looking at the past.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.